While Brian Stock's 1996 study, Augustine the Reader.
Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation, examined
Augustine's view of interpretation as an ascetic and ethically oriented
discipline aimed at self-transformation, this more recent work explores
the effects the bishop of Hippo's reading practices had on the later Middle
Ages and Renaissance, particularly as exemplified by Petrarch and Sir Thomas
More. Unusually compact and rather sparsely argued, Stock's book offers
an account of the interpretive practices grounding the forms of self-narration
characteristic of the Augustinian meditative tradition and its main Renaissance
offshoots. Stock's central claim is that the Augustinian tradition of reading
as an existentially committed form of self-contemplation (referred to after
the thirteenth-century as lectio spiritualis) constitutes a significant
and currently underappreciated genre of ethical thought and practice. At
its heart, Stock's book is a plea for the recovery of the Augustinian tradition
of reading as meditation - that is reading not for mere intellectual edification
but for the ethico-spiritual advancement of the interpreter.

Arguing that the lectio spiritualis played a central
role in the development and consistency of European thought from Augustine
to Pascal, Stock forwards the view that it was not only the Latin language
that informed the cultural identity of late medieval and Renaissance Europe,
but also a common set of reading practices. The book's erudite history of
these practices and some of the central elements inherent in them are of
genuine scholarly value to those concerned with the relations between reading
and meditation in the Western tradition. However, Stock's nostalgic emplotment
of the history of lectio spiritualis, in which modern forms of reading
and self-narration are configured as a fall from the edenic moment at which
Augustine unified inward experience with outward representation, is of less
value.

Stock begins by pointing out that although Augustine
did not systematize his views of reading, his works, particularly The
Confessions, became the focus of subsequent debates on the topic. He
then traces the unsystematized but nonetheless consistent theory of reading
in Augustine in relation to Augustine's philosophy of language, his method
for interpreting the Bible, and in his personal account of his spiritual
education. These three elements come together, Stock explains, in shaping
Augustine's narrative of the self and the interpretive practices upon which
this narration is predicated. The key point in Stock's initial analysis,
and one that is developed throughout the book as a whole, is that Augustine's
formation of a self-reflective reader offered an historically unprecedented
approach to ethical thinking through acts of reading and interpretation.
What is new about this approach, Stock claims, is that it posits a view
of the literary imagination in which the interpretive and creative faculties
can work to not only express a philosophy of life, but can play an active
role in sustaining such a way of life. What thus distinguishes Augustine
from previous Christian philosophers according to Stock is the existential
dimension of The Confessions - the fact that Augustine seeks to not
merely describe the self but to transform the self through the very act
of self-description. This regime of self-transformation through reading
operates, Stock argues, insofar as Augustine connects intentions and ethics
through narrative. By conjoining will with ideal through story, Augustine
sets in motion a reading practice that will have an enormous impact on the
Western tradition of self-narration and self-understanding.

Exploring the history of this reading practice, the first
main chapter in Stock's work outlines the general characteristics of Augustine's
inaugurating of the soliloquium which Stock defines as "a type
of discourse in which a person and his rational spirit entered into debate
in the interior of the soul on the preconditions and limitations of self-knowledge"
(11). While the chapter offers a useful introduction to some of the genre's
major elements, including the importance of silence, will, and emotions,
its historical trajectory and anti-modern polemic is not compelling. At
the end of the chapter, Stock makes it clear that his history is an attempt
to distinguish the lectio spiritualis from twentieth-century forms
of interpretation (assuming for the moment we can even speak of such a grouping)
which, according to Stock, "considerably obscured the relationship
between reading and contemplative practice that was deliberately incorporated
into many late ancient and medieval writings on the self. As a result, a
new generation of readers has largely been deprived of the historical disciplines
that are needed to attain an understanding of [Augustine's] poetry of the
inner life" (23). While I think most scholars of early modernity share
Stock's concern with the loss of historical consciousness characteristic
of the last century, there is nothing redemptive (or philologically compelling)
about remaining melancholically attached to an Augustine who is portrayed
as the specific moment in history when an ideal unity of the inner nature
of the self and its outward literary articulations was realized. The problem
here is not simply ideological, it is methodological. Although Stock's study
demonstrates an enviable grasp of medieval and Renaissance traditions, it
remains disengaged from recent analyses of the rhetorical procedures by
which Augustine formally predicates the continuity between being and time
in the Confessions. In short, Stock's account of how Augustine's
texts work to fashion an existentially committed reader remains aloof from
questions of the philosophy of form --- questions which seem essential to
any book seeking to make a case for extending the Augustinian tradition
into post-modernity.

Unlike Marshall Grossman's recent analysis of the relations
between rhetoric and metaphysics in the Confessions, Stock does not
adequately address how Augustine's rhetorical procedures reflect and support
the historically-specific onto-theological presuppositions grounding the
unity of ethical commitment, intentional will and ideal form expressed in
the Confessions. To be more precise, Stock does not take into account
the extent to which the Confessions is predicated on the way it generates
a version of the self, as Grossman puts it, "that is brought into being
wholly within a system of signs, yet represents itself as the accurate copy
or reflection of an ontically prior and necessarily immutable origin"
(Story of All Things 63). While Grossman explains the precise ways
in which the rhetorical operations of Augustine's Confessions formally supports
(indeed helps generate) its onto-theological presuppositions, Stock uncritically
repeats these operations and the metaphysics they support. For instance,
in his discussion of Augustine's account of time in book 11, Stock points
out that for Augustine, "the present has no existence, since it is
all past or future; yet, if the intentional role of narrative is to be realized,
the present is everything, since the anxiety about the possible unreality
of the self is felt and relieved in the present. For Augustine, this is
a meditative present, that is, a presence that absorbs and dissolves
all fragmenting time zones" (34). As Grossman's reading of Augustine
indicates, this uniting of being and time in an iconic moment that dissolves
the conditions of difference and temporality is not simply a "mystical
step into self-awareness" that one takes or leaves depending on one's
faith (as Stock suggests in the line following the passage just quoted);
it is a structural effect generated by and grounded in specific formal features
and specific onto-theological presuppositions - presuppositions, need it
be said, which have undergone thorough demystification in the last century
in a half. In short, Stock's admiration for the way that Augustine connects
intentions and ethics through narrative proceeds as though the practice
of reading as contemplation were somehow recoverable in its medieval and
Renaissance forms without adequately thinking through why metaphysically
oriented forms of self-representation gave way to historically and psychologically
centered forms in the first place. Stock, in other words, does not fully
explain the implications inherent in the fact that Augustine's self-narration
relies on an ideological commitment to a meta-narrative and its accompanying
metaphysics for its rhetorical efficacy. There are good reasons that Augustine's
reading practices have disappeared in favor of the interpretive procedures
characteristic of such existentially committed disciplines as psychoanalysis,
phenomenology and deconstruction - disciplines which are indebted to the
Augustinian heritage even as they depart from it. For Stock's championing
of lectio spiritualis to be convincing this larger picture will have
to be taken into account and a far more nuanced presentation of modern forms
of reading, self-narration, and ethics will have to emerge.

Some of the difficult questions raised by Stock's richly
erudite, if methodologically unsatisfying, study of lectio spiritualis
are these: Why did this shift from Augustinian iconicity to early modern
self-difference happen in the first place? What changes in lived-experience
happened to necessitate such a shift in forms of self-narration? What precise
forms of ethically committed modes of reading and writing emerged in the
wake of this transition? And what sort of legitimacy should we grant to
the many contemporary forms of existentially engaged forms of critical reading
and expression that have arisen in place of lectio spiritualis? By providing
a highly learned discussion of Augustinian reading practices, Stock provides
some of the historical contexts needed for further analysis of these broad
and important questions.

Work Cited

Grossman, Marshall. The Story of All Things: Writing
the Self in Renaissance Narrative Poetry. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.

Responses to this piece intended for the
Readers' Forum may be sent to the Editor at M.Steggle@shu.ac.uk.